Sunday, January 24, 2016

John Pilger On Australia’s Crimes Against Humanity

The Anglo world doesn’t care that the
Zionist world murders the Palestinians and confiscates their land, because that
is what the Anglo world did to the native peoples whose lands the Anglo world
wanted. Genocide is an Anglo-Zionist habit.

January 22, 2016 "Information Clearing House"
- - On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be
celebrated in Australia. It will be "a day for families", say the
newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners
and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

For many, there is relief and
gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an
Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we
used to call "New Australians" often choose 26 January,
"Australia Day", to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be
touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench
their new flag.

It was sunrise on 26 January so many
years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw
wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy
coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain's
"First Fleet" dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment
the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the
euphemism was "settled". It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few
honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history.
He described the slaughter that followed as "a whispering in our
hearts".

The original Australians are the
oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because
their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this
fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported:
"It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that
quarter." This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great
Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns,
they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land
littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia's settler dead in mostly imperial
wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending
Australia.

This truth has no place in the
Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations,
apart from a facile "apology" in 2008, only Australia has refused to
come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue,
in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of
the genocide in their own mythical "settlement". Almost half a
century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in
Australia.

In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which
told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was
advised by a luminary in the business: "No way I could distribute this.
The audiences wouldn't accept it."

He was wrong - up to a point. When
Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant
land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000
people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across
the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front
of the screen and spoke in "language": their own. Nothing like it had
happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not
happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped
his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.

The star Indigenous AFL footballer
Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that
"the silence is broken". "Imagine," he wrote,
"watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices
committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the
governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your
people for their own benefit.

"Now imagine how it feels when
the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft -
the people in whose name the oppression was done - turn away in disgust when
someone seeks to expose it."

Goodes himself had already broken a
silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous
sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as
if under a cloud - with, wrote one commentator, "the sporting nation
divided about him". In Australia, it is respectable to be
"divided" on opposing racism.

On Australia Day 2016 - Indigenous
people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day - there will be no acknowledgement
that Australia's uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained
colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent
nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting
political grovelling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost
casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of "kaffir" -
abusing South Africans.

Apartheid runs through Australian
society. Within a short flight from Sydney, Indigenous people live the shortest
of lives. Men are often dead before they reach 45. They die from Dickensian
diseases, such as rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from trachoma, and
deaf from otitis media, diseases of poverty. A doctor told me, "I wanted
to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been
preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn't treat her because
she didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest the tablets. I feel
sometimes as if I'm dealing with similar conditions as the English working
class of the beginning of the industrial revolution."

The racism that allows this in one of
the most privileged societies on earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a
"Protector of Aborigines" oversaw the theft of mixed race children
with the justification of "breeding out the colour". Today, record
numbers of Indigenous children are removed from their homes and many never see
their families again. On 11 February, an inspiring group called Grandmothers
Against Removals will lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra, demanding
the return of the stolen children.

Australia is the envy of European
governments now fencing in their once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as
in Hungary. Refugees who dare set sail for Australia in overcrowded boats have
long been treated as criminals, along with the "smugglers" whose
hyped notoriety is used by the Australian media to distract from the immorality
and criminality of their own government. The refugees are confined behind
barbed wire on average for well over a year, some indefinitely, in barbaric
conditions that have led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental illness.
Children have not been spared. An Australian Gulag run by sinister private
security firms includes concentration camps on the remote Pacific islands of
Manus and Nauru. People often have no idea when they might be freed, if at all.

The Australian military - whose
derring-do is the subject of uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of airport
bookstalls - has played an important part in "turning back the boats"
of refugees fleeing wars, such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the
Americans and their Australian mercenaries. No irony, let alone responsibility,
is acknowledged in this cowardly role.

On this Australia Day, the
"pride of the services" will be on display. This pride extends to the
Australian Immigration Department, which commits people to its Gulag for
"offshore processing", often arbitrarily, leaving them to grieve and
despair and rot. Last week it was announced that Immigration officials had
spent $400,000 on medals which they will award their heroic selves. Put out
more flags.

- On January 26, Indigenous
Australians and their supporters will march from The Block in Redfern, Sydney,
to the Sydney Town Hall. The march will begin at 10am.

- On Thursday February 11, Grandmothers Against
Removals will address a rally in Canberra. This will start at 12 noon at the
Aboriginal Tent Embassy, then march to Parliament House.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West